This has to be one of the most epic, sweet, and noble romantic tales ever told. I read Jocelyn Godwin's translation, but I imagine the latin would heighten any reading of it..

As of the middle of April 2007 all books scanned by Microsoft and the U of T libraries will have a "digitized by Microsoft" watermark on every page. This boook was scanned previous to this . If you think this is acceptable , say nothing , do nothing.

This is a 1592 partial translation of an extraordinary early printed book published anonymously at the press of Aldus Manutius in Venice, 1499. It was written in a highly idiosyncratic language composed of Latin, Italian and Greek neologisms. The first vernacular translation of it was made in French in 1546, and this is the second translation in English.
The renown of the original is both for the typography and for the woodcuts, not all of which appear in the English translation.
A young man, Poliphilo, tells the story of a dream in which he searches for his lost beloved, Polia (his name means Lover-of-Polia) in an enchanted world of classical antiquity. This is primarily a spiritual quest, which the dream presents in enigmas. The woodcuts and descriptions of glorious architecture and garden settings were highly influential throughout Europe and the British Isles.
For any English reader who is interested in the Hypnerotomachia, while it takes a little practice to read the f's as s's, and see words like 'iuie' as 'ivy' and 'dyfhe' as 'dish', this Renaissance translation will be greatly rewarding as it conveys the flavour and mystery of the original allegory in the narrator's rich descriptions.
There is a constant play on the page between text, image, and hieroglyphic. See for example p. 81 for invented hieroglyphics, and p. 164, where early examples of Arabic and Hebrew type are set into the illustration alongside Latin and Greek.
The pdf file did not come through legible, but the DjVu looks perfect.
A facsimile of the original is available on the internet at http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/HP/hyp000.htm
For those inspired by the prose, and wanting to learn more about the Hypnerotomachia, there is an excellent essay in the introduction of Alberto Pérez-Gómez' 1992 book Polyphilo or The Dark Forest Revisited.

Part fictional narrative and part scholarly treatise, richly illustrated, the book is an extreme case of erotic furor, aimed at everything, but especially architecture, that the protagonist, Poliphilo, finds in his quest for his beloved, Polia. Polia's tirade defending the right of women to express their own sexuality is probably the first sustained argument of this type.